M. > M.'s Quotes

“For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

“Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.

-Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Fragmentation is the natural destiny of all power.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature’s ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name Of The Rose

“If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Oh, how proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason to be improper! It takes being in love to know something about yourself. Sometimes, with you, I feel like the slut of the world, the eager, faithful slut of the world. Does that seem proper to you?”
― John Williams

“I have said: "Blow out the lamp! Day is here!" And you keep saying: "Give me a lamp so I can find the day.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“How easy it was to mistake clear reasoning for correct reasoning!”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Most of the people on the night crew had not even been given spouses because they lacked, somehow, the essential capacity to connect to others, which was required for the creation of a family unit.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“But his mother laughed again in a reassuring, affectionate way. “No, no,” she said. “It’s just the pills. You’re ready for the pills, that’s all. That’s the treatment for Stirrings.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“Guilt and blame grew defuse when memory covered a millennia.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth. —Bene Gesserit Precept I”
― Brian Herbert, House Harkonnen

“Values, my dear grandchild, depend for their acceptance upon their success.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“Oh, I cannot understand these points — absolutely I cannot. And the strangest, most unintelligible fact of all is that authors actually can select such occurrences for their subject! I confess this too to pass my comprehension, to -But no; I will say just that I do not understand it. In the first place, a course of the sort never benefits the country. And in the second place — in the second place, a course of the sort never benefits anything at all. I cannot divine the use of it.”
― Gogol Nikolai, Le Manteau - Le Nez

“If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“هل الشجاعة أن يمتلك المرء اسرارا كثيره؟”
― وارد بدر سالم

“ما كانت الشهوة خطيئة يا ابنتي، و لكن الخطيئة شهوة دائما”
― وارد بدر سالم

“لو قايضتني بأصابعي لقبلت, بل سأعطيك وجهي طعاما و شرابا, و أمنحك كل جسدي, لك طعامي و شرابي و ثيابي و ذريتي و نسائي و ما أملك. أهبك سنوات عمري ما تقدم و ما تأخر و ما ظل مكتوبا في لوح القدر; لك نصفي و كلي و كل كلي, و لكن...عديني بقطرات من المطر, امسح العار فيها عن وجهي و أبل بها ريقي. عديني إلى ذلك اليوم الذي لا اتمنى ان اراك فيه, أما الآن فانطفئي.”
― وارد بدر سالم

“We know this moment of supreme power contained Failure. There can only be one answer. That completely accurate and total prediction is lethal.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Reason is the first victim of strong emotion," Scytale murmured.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“The freman are civil, educated and ignorant. They are not mad. They are trained to believe not to know. Believe can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah & Children Of Dune

“humans are creatures who give meaning to meaningless actions, and derive purpose from it.”
― Kinoko Nasu, 空の境界 上

“Because I think sins are things people individually carry, a burden that we ourselves make for our own fair share. Our sins become heavier the better our wisdom and common sense, and the greater our happiness.”
― Kinoko Nasu, 空の境界 上

“Belief bends reality.”
― Kinoko Nasu, 空の境界 上